Whatever one’s opinion of [Michael] Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks....Much more at the link. Well done.
The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.... Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran....
Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....
Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent." Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers? That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth! And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.
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1 – 200 of 213 Newer› Newest»Start at zero and you end up with crap. This was already apparent in 1968, but few noticed.
The overwhelming message several generations of kids received from us Boomers was the fanatic anti-bigotry crusade.
The world had to be morally purified, the normals had to be re-educated and made to renounce their culture, religion and traditions.
Being white and of European descent made one evil.
They kids did what we told them to do. They tried to purge the world of the evil Deplorables.
The therapeutic state eventually becomes the authoritarian state, following the logic that people exist to be cared for and governments exist to care. But dependency always creates resentment on the one part, and contempt on the other. Those with an authoritarian bent are here to tell us what's good for us, and to punish us for not accepting. Some people just live for an excuse to hate their fellow citizens, and here it is.
They have not abandoned civil liberties except as a tool...they never really believed in them to begin with. It was always just a cudgel to force the social change desired. Once achieved, easily discarded
Taibbi is one of the few honest liberals. He's also a great writer, so when I think he's right, I love reading him. When I think he's wrong, I can still enjoy a great turn of phrase, but hate what he's doing to what I see as reality.
He's clearly right here as today's liberals are aggressively illiberal. His one mistake is calling it "Trump-era." As he himself notes, the kids have been raised to be this way, it's been going on for far longer than Trump has been president. I noticed the seeds of it when I was in college in the early 90's and PC was the big new lefty idea. It broke out into the streets with Bush's election. Today's authoritarianism, bordering on outright fascism, is just a matter of degree, not of type, to what the left has been doing for at least generation.
That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth!
Not a Boomer, so I can't pretend to know how you "experienced youth", but for those of us who came after it certainly appears that the main feature of the Boomer "experience" was shallow contempt for all that came before. The result is unsurprising.
They have not abandoned civil liberties except as a tool...they never really believed in them to begin with. It was always just a cudgel to force the social change desired. Once achieved, easily discarded
It all started with hippie conformism.
Teach your children??? Well...
That article is getting a lot of attention. There are very few, vanishingly few, on the left willing to acknowledge what is happening to the Democrat Party.
The state lockdowns might help if those who have been blind open their eyes.
Here is a hilarious example of the insanity.
Spot on.
We are also in a spiral of thinking government needs to take care of....everything...and then when it messes up- when the curtain is torn back - the solution is always we need more government.
The contemptuous-of-civil-liberties generation has been indoctrinated by the universities.
University students are made to feel that any incipient thoughts that might be racist or sexist must be suppressed. Racist or sexist thoughts cause micro-aggressions that cause marginal students to fail.
The students themselves must suppress their own thoughts, and the university administrators must suppress the students who do not suppress their own thoughts. This thought-control must be done in order to protect marginal students from academic failure.
=====
Therefore, many in this generation approve of the Obama Administration's efforts to determine the thoughts of the incoming National Security Advisor in January 2017. Maybe Flynn's thoughts were bad and harmful.
Maybe Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence. If so, then the FBI should determine Flynn's motives for lying to Pence. If Flynn's thinking was bad, then the FBI was right to expose, humiliate and expel Flynn from the government.
The model is the universities. If a university student has bad, harmful thoughts and might commit micro-aggressions, then the university's diversity administrators are right to expose, humiliate and expel that student from the university.
"Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself."
-- This has been on the rise since at least the second Bush's administration, except for their visceral dislike of the PATRIOT Act.
"Up the establishment" and "Speak truth to power" were all well and good when THEY were the establishment and the power. But now WE are the establishment and the power. So shut up and get in line.
We've marinated the last two generations in soft focus collectivist Howard Zinn-style BS and now most young people don't even know what civil liberties are.
The best response I've seen to the "Flynn pleaded guilty" crowd is that the Central Park Five also pleaded guilty.
(pled or pleaded?)
Taibbi is a free thinker journalist. There only a handful left.
Whatever one’s opinion of [Michael] Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks....
INGA - I suggest you read that over and over again, until you DEPROGRAM yourself.
Sally "The Logan Act Enforcer" Yates' justification for persecuting Michael Flynn was that Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak knew that Flynn had violated the USA's Logan Act. Therefore, Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Therefore, the FBI should expose Flynn's vulnerability and expel him from his government position.
This was the same justification that was used in past decades against homosexuals in government positions. Like Flynn, a homosexual in a government position was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. As in the case of Flynn, the FBI had to expose that person's vulnerability and expel him from his government position.
After all, the danger was serious.
* It did happen that Russia blackmailed homosexuals into becoming spies for Russia.
* It did happen that Russia blackmailed violators of the Logan Act into becoming spies for Russia.
Sally "The Logan Act Enforcer" Yates was dealing with a serious threat to our county's security.
Most loyal hive-mind leftists don't give two shits about the civil liberties of their Maddow-pimped enemies.
“ The best response I've seen to the "Flynn pleaded guilty" crowd is that the Central Park Five also pleaded guilty.”
So did Zinoviev.
Wow! This is quite a post from our hostess. I’m with her 100% on this.
I have characterized this as the Gramscian long march through the institutions. The boomers were the useful idiots who became faculty and journalists and clergy and fake scientists and Libruls and celebs and public employee unions indoctrinating the kids who are now under the thumb of the Rudi Dutschke types of this world. It’s really appalling how successful that strategy has been.
As The OrangeMan tweeted this weekend, the Democrats are vicious, and the boomers have done this.
- Krumhorn
Yes, the judge in the Central Park Five case should have charged those five kids for lying to the police when they confessed to participating in a gang rape.
The kids might be exonerated for the gang rape, but they still should be charged for lying to the police.
Journalism fucks up 101 is misguided criticism. It's a business model and supplies what the audience for the Trump-disaster memes wants to live out in their fantasy lives. They sell eyeballs, not news.
The audience does not care if it's true. They like living it.
Taibbi is a free thinker journalist. There only a handful left.
There's a market for anti-media memes too.
I saw a good Joe Rogan podcast with Matt Taibbi back in November. They both self-describe as lefties, but I think that actually they're maturing and becoming right-wingers. Rogan especially.
This is a great piece by Taibbi. I sent it to friends yesterday. It fits with my Grand Unified Theory of American politics: the Democrats want a class society. The attitude Taibbi identifies is just exactly that of the English aristocratic class in earlier times.
Ann highlighted the keys.
they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.
&
Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent.
Also - see the collective left's hatred for due process against the accused on campus and the absolute bullshit and lies they use to smear Betsy DeVos.
Any lie for the march to leftwing fascism.
We’ve seen it. We’ve warned y’all about it. Being in auto-resistance mode is by definition reactionary and given Trump’s habit of feinting one way while moving another, causes reflexively stupid acts like siding with China against their own country, rooting for extrajudicial machinations like the out-if-control Sullivan, praise thuggish jack-booted SWAT raids on d men who filed improper paperwork, and just to top it off mock and make fun of a former Biden employee who has a credible story of not just sexual abuse (which the smart people have decided is OK for Joe to enjoy) but a cruel illegal termination in retaliation for reporting abuse.
Between shapeshifting Progressive moralizing and the psychotic rejection of white and working class voters, the D party is having a helluva new century.
“ It's a business model and supplies what the audience for the Trump-disaster memes wants to live out in their fantasy lives. They sell eyeballs, not news. The audience does not care if it's true. They like living it.”
Worth repeating. The media are relentlessly dishonest because a lot of people like them that way.
YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown
""Anything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy," CEO Susan Wojcicki told CNN."
Blogger MayBee said...
"We are also in a spiral of thinking government needs to take care of....everything...and then when it messes up- when the curtain is torn back - the solution is always we need more government."
Indeed. When more government, more laws, more regulations and more control is the answer to every problem you have embraced fascism.
COVID-19 is teaching us that one-size-fits all doesn't work, particularly when implemented under zero-tolerance rules. Trump is showing us the value of flexible rules and experimentation by pushing the 50 states to each define their own solution. Does anyone really think South Dakota and New York City should have identical responses to COVID-19?
One of the reasons I have not voted for any Democratic Party candidate for President for many years: the Dems have become ever more like the Republicans. (Another reason: they keep putting forth shitty candidates.)
Senator Obama's vote for the 2008 FISA Amendments Act was the reason I decided against my tentative decision to vote for him in 2008. During his campaign, he had opposed the bill, vowing he would not support it as long as it included a provision to give the telecoms immunity from being sued for their cooperation with the Bush Administration's illegal wire-tapping of Americans, (revealed belatedly by the NY TIMES, who had sat on the information for a year at the request of the Bush administration). The bill went to vote still containing that provision, but Obama voted for it. I thought, "Shit! He promised his supporters he wouldn't support this, and he voted for it anyway! If he has the gall to break promises to his supporters before he has even won, WTF would ensure he will ever keep his promises once he's in the White House?" (He gave some lame post-vote excuse that, when President, he would revisit the law and "make revisions" to it. As fucking IF!!)
They've become the FASCISTS they accuse everybody else of being.
...... actually they're maturing and becoming right-wingers
And very possibly Ann. She calls it cruel neutrality, but I’m thinking she’s finally breaking free from the leftie mental lockstep. I used to be a leftie so I know what it feels like to have the veil lifted.
- Krumhorn
That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth! And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.
Althouse this is the most boomer thing you coold have posted. If boomers had wanted to produce another generation of boomers then you would have emulated they way your parents raised you perfectly. That is not what you (I am speaking about your generation not you specifically ) did. The cry of most new parents is, 'I am not going to make all the mistakes my parents made'. So I ask you, when you became a mother did you, become your mother or did you become the mother you wished your mother had been? Answer that question and you answer yours.
Politico has a hit piece out on Tara Reade. They are victim shaming. Now the shit is about to hit the fan, because it's all going to come out on Christine Blasey Ford now. They are about to get hit with what THEY did. Payback IS a bitch.
COVID-19 is teaching us that one-size-fits all doesn't work, particularly when implemented under zero-tolerance rules. Trump is showing us the value of flexible rules and experimentation by pushing the 50 states to each define their own solution. Does anyone really think South Dakota and New York City should have identical responses to COVID-19?
Exactly.
And counterfactuals are proof of nothing, obviously, but if it were South Dakota with the numbers and New York with hardly any cases, I think people would see very clearly that the two should be treated differently. I think we'd be very much like, "Oh look, there's this think happening in South Dakota what are they doing wrong there?"
"Yes, the judge in the Central Park Five case should have charged those five kids for lying to the police when they confessed to participating in a gang rape.
"The kids might be exonerated for the gang rape, but they still should be charged for lying to the police."
Should the police then have been charged for coercing false confessions? (Hmmm, come to think of it....)
Replying to Mike Sylwester about the Logan Act. Just as a matter of commensense, why should it be prohibited for an incoming administration to have general discussions with representatives of foreign countries regarding what policy changes are being considered, or should be anticipated, when the new administration takes office? It seems to me that a smooth transition absolutely requires reassurances to other countries: "No we are not planning to invade your country." "Yes the president is committed to new restrictions on immigration, but we expect that to take time and perhaps new legislation." "THe new administration will want to open talks on revising the earlier agreement." Conceivably one could make the argument that this is exactly what the Logan act prohibits, but if so, it is a bad law, and one that (by general bipartisan consensus throughout history) should never be enforced.
Dems are authoritarian
because they won the culture war
Resistance means going around shooting the wounded
What makes people grow up to be followers?
It starts with “privilege” and shame.
Next comes a zero-sum mentality that what I have deprives others.
All layered on top of relentless social bullying that people would do anything to avoid.
#Fascism101
Should the police then have been charged for coercing false confessions? (Hmmm, come to think of it....)
In the Flynn case or the Central Park Five case?
"In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent"
Prog respect for civil liberties was always instrumental and situational: free speech was great when and insofar as it served leftists or civil rights activist. Etc.
"Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect."
No: in the manner of Jacobins.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....
Much more at the link. Well done.
"What makes people grow up to be followers? That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth!"
Ah, yes, the most fashion-obsessed, pop-craze-influenced, mindlessly-trend-following generation in the history of the human race "experienced" itself as brave nonconformists, its self-congratulation reverberating across decades.
"And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders."
Cuz the kids realized the rebellion was a phony pose.
Prog rebellion was always about solidifying political power and cultural hegemony.
Taibbi doesn't really explain why or how it's "a fatal political mistake".
I could be wrong about what Mike Sylwester is saying, but I think part of the point is that it is only the fact that the FBI says something is blackmail-abile that makes it blackmail-able.
If the FBI didn't care about homosexuality, it wouldn't be blackmail able.
If the FBI admitted the Logan act is bunk- especially for the great Office of The President-Elect of the United States"- then it would not be blackmail-able.
h said...
"Up the establishment" and "Speak truth to power" were all well and good when THEY were the establishment and the power. But now WE are the establishment and the power. So shut up and get in line.
5/17/20, 8:23 AM
Thia. Remember all those 60's and '70's movies celebrating the lone individual up against the brutal Establishment - from "Cool Hand Luke" to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?" Now nonconformity is evil.
I am both amused and appalled to hear Boomer leftists heatedly defending Comey and Brennan. The FBI is good! It's like the Church Commission never happened.
Agree that the Taibbi article is excellent, both on analysis and style. The man can think AND write. We need more like him; but as rhhardin says, the business model doesn’t need or want that. Lots of people just want to be entertained, which mostly means being served up their own prejudices and preconceptions.
Agree also that we have been undergoing a Gramscian transformation for several generations. That soppy anthem by CSN&Y really set the tone: witless sentimentality that justified SJW avant la lettre, hordes of eager young hippie-Marxists building out the shiny new disciplines of Critical Studies, swamps of unfalsifiable bullshit from opacity-mongering French deconstructionist “thinkers,” and on it has gone.
A reckoning is overdue.
The Daily Beast put out a hit piece on Catherine Herridge for having the gall to report facts straight from the government's own files. The mean girls at the "Let's Get Trump" journalist table don't like that one bit.
Another progressive liberal to the rescue.
If anyone was serious about the Logan Act, Nancy Pelosi would have been accused during the Bush administration when she went to Syria to undercut him. Or when John Kerry was going to Iran after Trump was elected.
this is all theater for the left.
h @ 8:52: Agree about Logan Act. How can it be wrong for a designated official in the newly elected administration to start doing his or her job by reaching out to counterparties —especially in foreign governments with whom relations may be awkward and in need of prompt care? Doubly so when the outgoing administration quite deliberately and gratuitously dropped a turf in the punch bowl by expelling diplomats or seeking to impose sanctions with that counter party?
If Logan Act were to operate, every administration must be guilty of it. Are we to believe that Bush Admin did not brief Obama incoming people on open issues with foreign governments and include them in ongoing conversations, or encourage them to make those calls, as part of the succession planning?
It was bullshit and should be exposed as such.
"Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers?"
Religion is a big piece of it. You had religious people. Then you had a generation that fell away from religion, but religion still impacted their thinking. A couple more generations on, and it's all washed out: the kids have nothing to guide them in deciding for themselves this is right and that's wrong, so they just sign up with someone who tells them they're right, whatever they do.
The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations
Where is the evidence that FISA has been abused by Republican Administrations? It was around for the last 8 months of the Bush II Administration.
MadMan, I had the very same question. Glad you hear someone ask it out loud.
Listening to that song by CSN&Y, it sounds so insipid -- doesn't really work anymore, hard to believe it ever did (but I remember when it came out, and back then it did). A better fit for Taibbi's rant (and I think he's basically right) would be "you have to be carefully taught", the song that created quite a stir in 1948. The wokidokes he is talking about have indeed been carefully taught.
Democracies don’t work unless the citizens are self disciplined and self governed. Formerly Religion was the means of that self government. More than offending one’s neighbor was the concern of offending one’s God.
Where is the replacement of that? Darwinism? Social pressure? These both structurally tend toward force. The strong crushing or killing the weak.
""Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power?"
What political party exists or has ever existed anywhere that is or was not intent on expanding its power? That's kind of the point: to gain enough power to effectively achieve its goals more of the time than not and to fight against the the counter-goals of the other party (or parties), or at least to be able to forge acceptable compromises.
Authoritarian always about to be practiced by Trump when actually being practiced by blue politicians everywhere. They blame Trump to hide what they are doing, and Matt Taibbi is the useful idiot that supports them while claiming it is wrong.
Where is the evidence that FISA has been abused by Republican Administrations?
It’s equivalent to the “Orange Man Bad” disclaimer in every article or essay criticizing the Democrats’ obvious and extensive corruption.
lets also consider that Crosby Stills and Nash sang “teach your children well” while also advocating or exemplifying principles and lifestyles that contributed to the weakening and even the destruction of the family - the one place where children get tight well.
There seems to be enough of a yearning in some folks to be "taken care of". Leftists and progs have recognized the usefulness of this angle to co-opt generations into their fascist schemes. One might well ask, "where's the cheese" when it gets to this question of being cared for. Unfortunately that question is usually posed just before the trap snaps shut. Game Over. It's just a shot away.
"Where is the evidence that FISA has been abused by Republican Administrations? It was around for the last 8 months of the Bush II Administration."
The Bush II administration violated the previous FISA provisions in its broad post-9/11 illegal surveillance of the telephone communications of US citizens, with the criminal cooperation of the telecoms.
As far as I can tell, most of my (former) fellow Berkeley antiwar (Vietnam) protesters are appalled at people not following the covid rules. And most still consider themselves part of the counterculture.
It becomes clearer every day that radical progressives have taken over the
democrat party. And their program is simple and appealing to large groups:
-Open borders,
-Simple, easy and quick path to citizenship, and
-Pay back time for white privilege (a policy that is sure to be very popular with the new open-border citizens).
I find it very refreshing to read Taibbi. Same with other honest liberals, like Greenwald or Dershowitz (strange bedfellows).
I grew up in a very liberal family. I was a liberal in high school in the 80's, as were all my friends. (But I was starting to wake up.) I learned a lot about what liberals believe, first hand.
What happened? Where did they go? What ever became of the liberals I grew up with? They hated the FBI and the CIA. They were First Amendment fundamentalists. They considered the Soviet Union an overblown threat that should be appeased. (Now they're treating China the same way, but Russia has become the villain.) They were against undeclared wars. I could go on and on. The liberals have become the advocates of tyranny, surveillance, perpetual war, and even actual fascism. They are the embodiment of everything Orwell warned us about. (And Ray Bradbury too, who had something to say about book burnings.) It's truly remarkable to observe.
And they project all their hatred and hypocrisy onto Trump and his supporters. Trump is, for the most part, advocating a pro-freedom agenda. He is trying to bring peace, and wind down wars. He is confronting government corruption on a massive scale. He is exposing the unconstitutional abuses of power among numerous agencies. He is trying to revitalize the economy for the average worker by tearing down regulations. Yet somehow, he's the fascist.
The ACLU leads the way in abandoning due process, protections found in the 1A, 4A, 5A. It NEVER EVER had an concern for 2A protections.
So where is the ACLU going? Back to the communist, totalitarian roots of its founder, Roger Baldwin. A 90-year history back to total government. Wasn't ever worth it.
Not just contempt for civil liberties--contempt for liberty, period.
I've said for years that the "left wing/right wing" paradigm is a-historical, misleading and needs to be trash-canned. The terms were derived from the French Parlement, where the Right Wing consisted of the authoritarian, pro-Establishment crowd. According to Jonah Goldberg it was the Stalinists of the twentieth century who decided to apply "right wing" to anyone from Leon Trotsky to H. L. Mencken who objected to Stalin, and vice versa.
But if there's any group in the US today that's authoritarian, it's "liberals," "progressives" and other State fellators. And the pandemic has only made that more obvious.
"Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties/The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake."
No kidding but that is cause "civil liberties" are and have been used by Democrats as a means to more power, not as a "core believe". Just remember jim crow, anti-2A, Japaneses internment, and, crap, could do this all day...
"lets also consider that Crosby Stills and Nash sang “teach your children well” while also advocating or exemplifying principles and lifestyles that contributed to the weakening and even the destruction of the family - the one place where children get tight well."
Where, when, and how did CSN "advocate or (exemplify) principles and lifestyles that contributed to the weakening and even the destruction of the family...?"
Is it a generation, though? I see a lot of middle-aged liberals on TV repeating the talking points. The young SJWs seem strangely silent. Maybe when the colleges closed they lost their megaphones. Certainly, college events do seem to be the one way for young people to break into the news and with the colleges closed that possibility is gone, but I don't detect much low level rumblings from the kids on Twitter demanding that they stay home with their parents.
"Wokidokes." I like that.Reminds me of President Okeydoke, the Red Diaper Baby.As (I think) Glenn Reynolds pointed out, it was in the first Okeydoke administration that "liberals" changed the bumper-stickers on their cars from the ones that said "Question Authority" to the ones that said "Obey." That legacy remains with us.
I'm sorry but your generation was raised EXACTLY that way. Or should I say that was the story you sold yourselves. You were 'rebels' because you wanted to do exactly what you wanted to do and damn the authorities if they disagreed!
The Boomer 'dedication' to civil liberties extended exactly as far as stopping THEIR speech from being shut down and not a step farther.
Clinton was a Boomer
Comey was a Boomer
Obama was a Boomer
Most of these pundits excoriating anti lockdown protests are your fellow classmates or the CHILDREN of your classmates. Well done for you to care about the PRINCIPLES, but while there are a few fellow voices out there, they are a very distinct minority.
So either most of your generation didn't believe in civil liberties except as a weapon (Rules for Radicals) or they absolutely SUCK as teachers of those same principles.
Which looking at our current educational output...
Democrats have taken over the schools where they teach children to despise their nation as uniquely and irredeemably racist and unjust. They are also taught that freedom of speech and other civil liberties are just a way for the white patriarchy to perpetuate their power and oppress anyone who isn't a cis-white male. The pertinent question is: why do some members of the younger generations still value freedom?
"And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders."
Yeah, your parents were better than you, you were raised by the greatest generation. Your generation, not so great.
"Democracies don’t work unless the citizens are self disciplined and self governed. Formerly Religion was the means of that self government. More than offending one’s neighbor was the concern of offending one’s God.
"Where is the replacement of that? Darwinism? Social pressure? These both structurally tend toward force. The strong crushing or killing the weak."
It's no different, and can be worse, in theocracies. Religion, when made integral to or a basis of government's functioning and laws, tends to create highly punitive and restrictive societies, because then it becomes not just man's law, but god's law, against which there can be no rational or persuasive counter argument.
"Does anyone really think South Dakota and New York City should have identical responses to COVID-19?"
It appears progressives do, they're all about intentions rather than results and equality of outcome. Once you permit different approaches to a problem, you admit the possibility of different outcomes. What's worse, your preferred approach may prove to have been a poor choice. Making everybody do the same thing means you never have to find out you were wrong.
Kaboom! Matt Taibbi for the win.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....
The Dems are disgraceful. I used to confine this to Dem politicians, not the bulk of Dem voters. But sadly that has changed. The Dems have wrecked the colleges, the media, Hollywood, and then weaponized Brennan's CIA and Comey's FBI against their perceived opponents.
Now, blue state governors wanna sink the economy to spite Trump.
So, screw 'em. There's too many clueless enablers among the Dem voters who endorse this behavior.
Cook, fallen or corrupted religion - pharisaic religion - does indeed have that problem. But would you argue that everyone living by Christ’s teachings would make society worse?
It comes down to education. While you were doing a great job teaching law, most people from our generation who never left the universities were enthralled by Marxism in college and stayed on to teach it. For generations. And what we have now is the results of that.
Teaching the importance of individual liberties and individual rights has been replaced by stressing the 'morality' of collectivism. We stress tribes. And we even create our own caste of 'good' tribes (POC, women, immigrants, trans/bi/queer) and 'bad' tribes (white men). Pound this stuff into future teachers in education schools, and future journalists in J schools and let them dictate the thinking and coverage for about 30 years and...voila! This is what you get. A generation who thinks dumping the economic system that created more wealth and freed more people than any in the history of the species should be dumped for an economic system that has had more trial runs in the last 100 years than anything in history and the best that can be said for it is that it only killed 100 million people. (could have been worse).
When the communists said they would win the long march through our institutions, they were not kidding. We're at the fork in the road right now. We either clean it up now, or it's time to start getting your head right and use the approved words and thoughts.
"Trump is, for the most part, advocating a pro-freedom agenda."
What is his "pro-freedom agenda?"
"He is trying to bring peace, and wind down wars."
He says he is, which is admirable, but where has he actually done it? Rather than try to "wind down wars," why does he not simply recall all our troops from all overseas battlefields? There is no "trying to bring peace." We either withdraw from the fights or we stay forever.
"He is confronting government corruption on a massive scale." How? Where? What has he accomplished or even tried?
"He is exposing the unconstitutional abuses of power among numerous agencies."
Such as? Are the practices he is allegedly exposing actually unconstitutional?
"He is trying to revitalize the economy for the average worker by tearing down regulations."
What regulations is he tearing down, and how do they help average workers or citizens, rather than the corporations (who are now more free to pollute the air, water, and land, to sell dangerous goods, and operate unsafe workplaces)?
Everything about k-12 teaches you to be a follower.
I'm not even talking about the Marxist march through the disciplines or the content of history class to use a gender, class, race, lens.
I'm talking about the experience itself.
Children no longer spend 2-3 hours learning the three Rs followed by extensive outdoor unsupervised play. They spend nearly 7 hours sitting inside. Kids who have trouble with this are branded as ADD or having "learning" disabilities ir qnxiety or depression. They are medicated into compliance. They live on medication to make them compliant beginning in early childhood. Step out of line, and you're drugged. Parents concede routinely.
The tasks assigned in school encourage compliance by overvaluing emptong snd expressing personal emotion at the expense of taking in knowledge of the world. Sonce atudents don't have common vocabulary levels, reading comprehension, or worldly knowledge, teachers only assign emptive "journaling", constantly asking children their inner private experience.
They do not protect childrens' Private Lives or inner experience. So by afulthood, there is no sense of privacy to maintain.
Then these journals are shared through "peer review", even in early elementary. So children learn what the appropriate answers to avoid shame are.
Theres nothing countering this mass mentality. Nothing left in the private sphere. Identity exposed is good for you because it gains you status.
Students no longer read about military or political heroes from the past because these figures are seen as alien or deficient for not adopting modern viewpoints. They don't learn about those eho had negative behaviors or values, by modern standarss, yet excelled ,or those whose ideas were divergent. Students do not debate ideas because that can offend or make uncomfortable. Everyone must be comfortable. So everyone follows.
Haven't you read the Coddling of the American Mind?
"And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders." [AA]
This unfortunately seems like more of the endless loop known as StuckInTheSixties Disorder, a very common syndrome.
the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations
BOTH Democrat and Republican administrations?? That's the year Obama was elected and so . . .
No, you know what? I'm not playing this stupid game. This isn't discussion, and it sure as hell isn't marketplace of ideas. I'm not jumping through hoops waiting to be granted an audience. I've dealt with enough of this lockdown shit elsewhere.
Was James Comey the man behind the curtain or was he part of the curtain?
Money quote from ed morrisey at Hot Air "Power is the point of progressivism, and its concern for civil rights has always been a cover for that purpose".
The sham of 60s liberalism is slowly being exposed.
The Bush II administration violated the previous FISA provisions in its broad post-9/11 illegal surveillance of the telephone communications of US citizens, with the criminal cooperation of the telecoms.
It's rare that I agree with Cook but the post 9/11 Patriot Act and the FISA law both need to be repealed. The CIA has been useless and misused for years. The FBI needs to revert to a police force that can cross state lines but has no role in DC.
Will Taibbi ecer ask : So who tore the curtain of respect (pretend) for civil liberties? and who put blindfold on own eyes?
Democrats have managed to turned into
The Bush II administration violated the previous FISA provisions in its broad post-9/11 illegal surveillance of the telephone communications of US citizens, with the criminal cooperation of the telecoms
I appreciate the answer about the previous FISA. I will suggest that Obama weaponized the current politically. (No wonder Obama is trying to refocus to COVID!) Were Bush II's subjects all Democrats? I don't recall reading that.
It's a "fatal political mistake" because those who want to control everything and everyone are only a small part of the population. Taibbi's argument works better with other issues, though - shutdowns, climate change, political correctness - than with the Flynn case. Much of the public doesn't care about Flynn or Russia or Obamagate, and the partisans who do are the kind of people who when they sink their teeth into something never let go. Whichever side you're on, if you're committed enough and passionate enough you go after the other side with all you've got - or all you think you've got.
Somehow Atticus Finch turned from a hero to a villain. Go figure.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist. --- Ayn Rand
--------------===============
Did the "rebels" of the 60's and 70's fight for principles or against their parents' conformism? and who egged them on!?
Taibbi: "Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish,"
Uh, paging Ken B....
The turning point for a lot of liberal people I know was Edward Snowden. A lot of liberal people fell in love with Valerie Plame even though she was a CIA agent, but at least she got to pretend she was a victim of the administration because she was a whistleblower.
But look at Snowden. He proved the US government under Obama was spying and collecting data on every US citizen, and Obama went after him. The Obama admin even grounded a plane thinking he might be on it. And the people on the left who I knew were upset about the data collection slowly came around to the idea that Snowden was a traitor. The preposterous line became "he did some good, but in order to be a good citizen he needs to come take his just punishment for it".
What if Snowden had been discovered before he got the information to Greenwald, et al? What do we think his "just punishment" might have been?
"Yeah, your parents were better than you, you were raised by the greatest generation."
The Greatest Generation also gave us Social Security and The Great Society. Just sayin'.
"That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth!"
I like the use of the word "experienced" in this sentence. Are you sure your belief about the experience of the event, Boomer youth, isn't just self-flattery?
"Yeah, your parents were better than you, you were raised by the greatest generation."
The Greatest Generation also gave us Social Security and The Great Society. Just sayin'.
"Where is the evidence that FISA has been abused by Republican Administrations? It was around for the last 8 months of the Bush II Administration."
That is what is called throwing them a bone.
Remembering all the shrieking when the Bush administration was pushing the Patriot Act (GOP Bad! Librarian Ladies for Privacy!), Taibbi is pretty safe writing in the Rolling Stone assuming that Team Bush took advantage of the opportunities offered by the statute. And who knows what Trump is doing?
I will say that Glenn Greenwald has been very consistent in warning that if you give these powers to government, they will be abused. Taibbi has been more attuned to what happened rather than what might happen, as a good reporter should be. Greenwald was right then and
he is right now. Other honest lefties --Michael Tracey comes to mind--take the same position as Greenwald and Taibbi. And they trace this back to the Bush/Cheney post 9/11 actions, which many of us applauded.
It has given me a lot to think about. Have that Patriot Act powers really headed off any significant terrorist incidents? Are they just tools to spy on Americans and others? All the lone wolf incidents weren't prevented by this stuff. The FISA court shenanigans show how worthless those "protective procedures" are.
My take on Matt Taibbi’s article is at the end of the ACLU/Betsy DeVos comment thread. But from where I sit the rot goes deeper and farther than that. Towards the end of his article Taibbi has a throwaway mention of “profound questions about speech and assembly,” but what’s happening on the First Amendment front is pretty bad, too. The right “peaceably to assemble” is applied to Antifa gatherings that are premised on violence, but there is pushback against poor people demonstrating for the right to get back to work. Freedom of religion apparently only apples to Muslims going to their place of worship for Eid-al-Fitr, not Jews celebrating Passover or (God forbid!) Christians celebrating Easter. And don’t get me started on “hate speech,” which only applies to Republicans saying things that makes Democrats and people who vote for Democrats feel uncomfortable, even if they’re true! Raw hatred directed at Republicans, well, that’s protected.
It can’t last, so it won’t. But I can’t imagine that fixing all this mess will be easy or pretty.
The problem is not individual but collective. There is no point in blaming Obama, or anyone else. These people are for the most part just driven by the stream, they do not direct it.
What you had once was one nation, one society, one culture. The customs and laws were held to be for the common good, and the elites, even when misbehaving and feeling superior, still had the old pro-common good noblesse oblige.
Thats quite gone, you are two castes at war now, and your old social structures are positions of advantage to be fought over. Thats why there is no law now, not in any sense that has to do with the power struggle. The venues for your old rituals are ruins, and the rubble is used to maneuver and conceal, to defend and attack.
That second caste did come from the "individualism" of the 60's, but it seems to me that other than a few weirdos, most everyone that rebelled against the old social unity rebelled in the cobtext of their own rival social unity, that is, by conforming to something else. The little "we are all individuals" bit in "Life of Brian" tells the whole story. Its the best of comedy, getting at the humor, the ridiculous, out of something poignant, and tragic and true. The Pythons were better prophets than they knew.
It was not a dispersal but a split. Add also the "long march", the "new class", the rise of the symbolic analysts, the centralization and the bureaucratization - the various other processes that accompanied the cultural split or drove the wedge deeper.
Over here outside the US its quite difficult to explain whats going on in the US. Things happen, and nobody can tell them why. The news is a puzzlement, they lack context. And of course the foreign media is little help here. They think the US is like their little society, still mainly unified, or if split, in ways understandable to them.
Religion is a big piece of it. You had religious people.
That's why the countries with the most religious populations, like Cambodia, Afghanistan and Somalia, are bastions of freedom and good behavior, while the least religious countries, like Sweden (boo!), Denmark, and Norway, are oppressive, violent and uncivilized.
More locally, religion surely explains why the most religious group of people, namely blacks, is so much better behaved than the least religious group, namely those pesky Asians.
Robert Cook said...
It's no different, and can be worse, in theocracies. Religion, when made integral to or a basis of government's functioning and laws, tends to create highly punitive and restrictive societies, because then it becomes not just man's law, but god's law, against which there can be no rational or persuasive counter argument.
5/17/20, 10:04 AM
Given the complete irrationality of many secular state governments, particularly when obvious counter-examples can be pointed to worldwide (Sweden, Georgia, etc)? Particularly when the government is throwing citizens in jail even as it releases career criminals? Trying to say "religion is tyranny" is particularly weak sauce. You'd have to go back to the Black Plague to see Christian governments employ similar restrictions, with much better cause and benevolence.
The FBI is supposed to investigate crimes and prepare cases. They are supposed to obey US laws and be held accountable if they don't. Its counter-intelligence activities are dangerous. The FBI needs to be led by virtuous men and woman with exceptional self-restraint ("We are not going to do that..."). It rarely has been.
The CIA is organized to violate the laws of other countries.
When you have a society split into tribes, beliefs, attitudes, symbols are merely tactical.
Thats why "civil liberties" and opinions re the FBI and CIA or foreign wars or "believe all women" can flip instantly. Its all about advantage in the death-struggle against the other tribe. Its even the case that if one side adopts a symbol, it becomes imperative to oppose that symbol, and maybe adopt a counter-symbol.
Nobody in all this believes anything, other than in ones tribal identity.
Progressives/Communists/Deconstructionists going back to Rousseau and now dominant in academe have taught that there is no such thing as true or false but only good and evil. "Revolutionary truth" is whatever narrative advances Revolutionary goals and bends "the arc of history." Truth has no other meaning, and "rights" just means the right to be "on the right side of History." There is no right to be wrong in their view - as long as they are the ones who get to say what is right. Of what value are civil liberties compared to the attainment of the nirvana which exists (and can only exist) in their imaginations - and, coincidentally, draws power and money to people like themselves?
If the FBI didn't care about homosexuality, it wouldn't be blackmail able.
It’s been situational since the late 1980s. If you’re still in the closet then you presumably really can be blackmailed so it’s an issue. But if you’re out of the closet then, obviously, there’s no way to hold your sexual orientation over your head.
If boomers had wanted to produce another generation of boomers then you would have emulated they way your parents raised you perfectly. That is not what you (I am speaking about your generation not you specifically ) did. The cry of most new parents is, 'I am not going to make all the mistakes my parents made'. So I ask you, when you became a mother did you, become your mother or did you become the mother you wished your mother had been? Answer that question and you answer yours.
Very interesting point.
Rebellion is a natural part of growing up, as youngsters move away from their parent's control. When parents make things too easy for their kids, what is there to rebel against? Maybe the kids miss an important stage of development, and that makes them more likely to be followers than leaders.
Indeed, the next decade will be a battle for hearts and minds.
I always viewed Trump as a transitional leader. A one-of-a-kind, man-of-the-hour who -- with remarkable foresight and combativeness -- was able to steer the country away from a permanent Clintonian Deep-State authoritarianism.
And I'm hopeful. In the wake of the WuFlu:
1.) Elite status and influence will be questioned like never before in academia, media and government.
2.)The Republicans have a deeper, younger bench with a more pragmatic, populist and less authoritarian message than the Democrats.
3.) The Red State - Blue State contrasts will become starker.
4.) Governments will have to struggle just to uphold past promises, never mind make new ones.
5.) The premises of globalism will be questioned like never before.
American history is no longer really taught because to do so would be to assert unity with and the symbols of the enemy caste. As that one caste controls nearly all education, the result is predictable.
"But republicans do it too."
is the standard answer from leftists regarding leftwing corruption.
You need a national divorce, and a war or two to settle the boundaries between the two peoples you have become.
I know its just voices in my head and not reality, but still.
I would enjoy it if Trump in one of his rambling answers at a presser, or interview, would muse about the foreign connections of Biden's campaign advisors, and maybe President Trump would have Grenell do some counter intel work, maybe file for a FISA warrant, just in the interests of National security. Hire a couple of human assets involve themselves in Biden's campaign, like Halper did. No big deal, just following the Obama precedent. Learn from my betters you know.
How would that get reported?
People in the know and understanding the time lines, and matching them up with govt documents are sure Flynn did not get unmasked, but got caught up in a FBI pen register gathering operation. In short the secure govt phone issued Flynn before the new administration took office (They issued him a secure phone to talk to foreign interests, so much for the Logan Act lie)Comey attached a pen register capture on. That allowed Comey to see exactly who was called when.
And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.
What do you mean “we,” Kemosabe? Some of us figured out how to instill respect for American values in our sons despite the best efforts of the educational system.
Journalism fucks up 101 is misguided criticism. It's a business model and supplies what the audience for the Trump-disaster memes wants to live out in their fantasy lives. They sell eyeballs, not news.
The audience does not care if it's true. They like living it.
This describes the current situation, but how did we get here? Twenty years ago people did not reflexively want to hate Trump. He went on to have a very popular tv show, and was a cameo in tv and Hollywood movies back in the 90s. But now about half the country wants to see him and his supporters dead. How did this happen?
There had been an anti-Republican, anti-conservative bias in the media-- news and entertainment-- for decades. It became blatant during the Gulf war under Bush Jr, and that's when I first noticed it. And I suspect the media discovered that hate got attention. Hate makes money. And they grew their audience peddling it.
The current business model for the news-media --selling hate-- panders to the baser side of humanity; which over time has a detrimental impact on society. They deserve criticism for it.
Jeez, Taibbi just skims the surface. The Democrat’s rabid contempt for free speech and due process has been obvious at least since the late ‘80’s. The Flynn thing, as awful as it is, seems like the rote business-as-usual shittiness of American politics compared to what was done to the Covington kids, the campus kangaroo courts, or any one of a thousand firings and deplatformings.
Tiabbi is Glenn Greenwald with about a 4-5 year lag time. Both are hyper-suspicious and hyper-opposed to the U.S. surveillance operation, but going into the just-completed decade, both were under the belief that the FBI, CIA and NSA were all essentially Republican/conservative operations.
Greenwald's eyes were opened around 2012, when the Obama Administration and most of the media turned on him and Julian Assange after the third round of the Bradley Manning wikileaks document dumps. The first two rounds had leaked Bush Administration classified info, so that was OK, but the third covered 2009, and offered up details on the Obama Administration and Hillary State Department operations.
Tiabbi didn't really change back then, but has over the last four years, as it's become more obvious there are lots of people in the intelligence-gathering bureaucracy that are on the Democrats' side, and lots of people who were Tiabbi and Greenwald's former soulmates who don't see a problem with that, as long as the surveillance state is gathering (and leaking) the information of the desired people.
Cook @ 10:18: “... We either withdraw from the fights or we stay forever.”
Is false binary rhetoric the only rhetoric you know?
buwaya said...
You need a national divorce, and a war or two to settle the boundaries between the two peoples you have become.
It's interesting to watch how Kurt Schlicter's novels have come to life about the divide between states.
Even funnier is how the blue county residents run to the red counties to get away.
Naples Councilman Gary Price told us he visited the beaches during [Saturday, May 9] to get a look for himself. And what he said he saw disappointed him, concerned him and caused him to make a call to the city manager about how to regain control of the beaches in the city.
“We really wanted to make sure that people were safe,” Price said. “And what I saw today is what I believe to be really not safe.”
Price took a picture while checking out the beach, and that’s what prompted him to take action, he said. Price said he saw signs that people were visiting from the east coast of the state since their beaches remain closed.
“I took some pictures of cars that were from Broward and Miami-Dade dealership plates,” Price said. “And so you could tell from the cars.”
Naples, on the Gulf Coast, is over run with Miami refugees
I expect something similar in California.
Women, and old guys with beards driving Subarus.
Krumhorn said...
...... actually they're maturing and becoming right-wingers
And very possibly Ann. She calls it cruel neutrality, but I’m thinking she’s finally breaking free from the leftie mental lockstep. I used to be a leftie so I know what it feels like to have the veil lifted.
- Krumhorn
5/17/20, 8:49 AM
Nah, she will vote D forever. Unless good hair Romneys come along from time to time and warm her lady parts. But there will always be the Ben Wiklers, whom she knows!, to gently grasp the ring in her nose and lead her back to the herd.
Yes, you boomers were raised to be rebels. Hello? You were being manipulated, by the same people who control the mass/pop culture and are always gatekeeping and setting "party lines". In the 30s it was "hate the rich" and "hate fascism" and "Government is great". In the 60s it was "rebel" against the old fuddy duddies who socially conservative, anti-communist, and against multi-culturalism.
"Free Speech" was in, because the Left didn't entirely control the levers of power. Once the left got the power, "Free Speech" became "Hate Speech" and gatekeeping/censoring became Cool again. As Sontag once said "That don't need free speech in the USSR, they have socialism".
I have book by a Englishman who witnessed the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. The week before Lenin's Coup the streets were full of demonstrators demanding Freedom of Speech, the Press, and Freedom to attack the Government. A week after Lenin took power, all street demonstrations for "free speech" were ruthlessly suppressed, and any newspaper not supporting the Communists was shut down.
The liberal/left has been playing the Free Speech Con game for over 100 years.
Its sad that Gen. Flynn was destroyed for no other reason than it tangentially hurts Trump. But that's how the liberal/left plays the game. Their motto has always been: "Just win, baby. Just win". Meanwhile the Conservative/Right is more concerned with losing for the correct reasons. "its not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game".
More dull scaremongering about the CV-19 virus. Outside of NYC metro area, Detroit, New Orleans, Philly, and and New England, the death rate is absurdly low. Yet, everyone is afraid to leave their homes.
Insanity!
Said by me last night on my Facebook page in the context of Ohio restrictions on the reopening of youth sports:
“And people wonder how good German citizens tolerated the Nazi regime.”
And our governor’s a nominal Republican.
"Yeah, your parents were better than you, you were raised by the greatest generation. Your generation, not so great."
If we're so un-great, why are the youngsters following us? I'm fine with saying the Boomers were full of themselves and selfish and blind, but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?
The Greatest Generation also gave us Social Security and The Great Society. Just sayin'.
5/17/20, 10:48 AM
I'll grant you The Great Society, but not Social Security. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935. The Greatest Gen were still kids then.
MadisonMan said...
The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations
Where is the evidence that FISA has been abused by Republican Administrations? It was around for the last 8 months of the Bush II Administration.
This is wrong.
The FISA Amendment act was merely a cover for what Bush II was already doing.
The Bushes voted for Clintons every chance they got.
You people desperately wish your votes weren't cast for evil people and you throw up weak justifications. The Republican party machine works for the globalists and they hated Reagan and Trump.
We were all dupes for a long time.
People in the know and understanding the time lines, and matching them up with govt documents are sure Flynn did not get unmasked, but got caught up in a FBI pen register gathering operation.
Which "people" would that be?
If you don't think Kislyak's phone was bugged you are deluding yourself.
Althouse wrote:
I'm fine with saying the Boomers were full of themselves and selfish and blind, but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?
5/17/20, 11:52 AM
This baffles me too. I've heard millennials bitterly blame their parents for ruining the country, while at the same time accepting every single left-wing Boomer premise taught by their professors.
Even the fashions are Boomer-knock offs. Dudes, the punks were sticking pins in their noses and coloring their hair pink back in '78. Tie-dye and Che T-shirts? Like P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out, imagine if he and his friends had showed up on campus in 1967 wearing zoot suits.
"If we're so un-great, why are the youngsters following us? I'm fine with saying the Boomers were full of themselves and selfish and blind, but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?"
Good God, Althouse! Have you talked to any free-thinking young people lately?
What you had once was one nation, one society, one culture.
When exactly was that? Certainly not before 1865. Certainly not during the wave of mass open immigration from the late 1860's to the 1920's. Certainly not during the period of the Jim Crow South (and the less rigid, but still pervasive segregation in the North). Are you looking at a few halcyon days in the mid-60s?
but there is pushback against poor people demonstrating for the right to get back to work.
Anyone who openly displays a firearm at a demonstration, is not "peaceably assembling". They are implicitly threatening those who disagree with them.
Cook: “... We either withdraw from the fights or we stay forever.”
Owen: "Is false binary rhetoric the only rhetoric you know?"
Cookie is fun to have around. He can find the mist amusing rationales for why every bad thing that happens across the globe for centuries is always due to Americas existence and policies.
If a butterfly falls in Madagascar Cookie will find a way to blame it on American imperialism.
Twilight faith. Pro-Choice religion. Diversity (i.e. color judgment) breeds adversity. Social (i.e. relativistic) justice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Feminism, masculinism is chauvinistic. Political congruence ("=") engenders progressive corruption. Liberalism is divergent. Progressivism is monotonic. Conservativism is moderating. #HateLovesAbortion #PrinciplesMatter
Just a wildass guess, Ann, but after going through the state propaganda mill called public education they don't know any better.
but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?
Lots of answers would fit.
here are a few: Public education, Hollywood, Social media, and Jimmy Kimmel.
Matt Taibbi, I remember many of your articles in 'Business Insider' from 2010 - 2014 [stopped reading when I got tired of the Liberal slants]. You're late to the party and I'm wondering whether or not you are adjusting your view according to how the 'wind is blowing'. But a lot of my 'Conservative' friends tell me 'it's better late then never'. I never believed in this myth. Although I confess I did briefly when finally this friend paid me the money he owed me. That's a concrete result I can endorse. You on the other hand are in a profession whose reputation is so bad 'Svali Speaks' is a Saintly personage.
Matt Taibbi, I remember many of your articles in 'Business Insider' from 2010 - 2014 [stopped reading when I got tired of the Liberal slants]. You're late to the party and I'm wondering whether or not you are adjusting your view according to how the 'wind is blowing'. But a lot of my 'Conservative' friends tell me 'it's better late then never'. I never believed in this myth. Although I confess I did briefly when finally this friend paid me the money he owed me. That's a concrete result I can endorse. You on the other hand are in a profession whose reputation is so bad 'Svali Speaks' is a Saintly personage.
Wince said...
Indeed, the next decade will be a battle for hearts and minds.
I always viewed Trump as a transitional leader. A one-of-a-kind, man-of-the-hour who -- with remarkable foresight and combativeness -- was able to steer the country away from a permanent Clintonian Deep-State authoritarianism.
Trump had to defeat the Bush wing GOPe first.
You all need to stop pretending the globalists don't have the republican politic machine on their side.
"I'll grant you The Great Society, but not Social Security. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935. The Greatest Gen were still kids then."
I was using this definition:
The Greatest Generation, also known as the "G.I. Generation," includes the veterans who fought in World War II. They were born from around 1901 to 1927 and came of age during the Great Depression.
Based on that, the oldest half were of voting age in 1935.
You know for all the hand-wringing about FISA and abuses by the intelligence agencies, I don't see anyone in the Trump administration, and precious few Republican legislators, actually advocating massive reform and reining in of them. If anything, Trump has made them more political and seems to think they are meant to serve him, not the country.
Freder: "When exactly was that? Certainly not before 1865."
Its important to emphasize the 1865 inflection point as the first time when the democrats refused to accept the results of an election and attempted to destroy the nation to gain power.
2016 is the second example of the democrats doing just that by refusing to adhere to the traditions of the peaceful transfer of power.
that's largely true, even in the uk, the left won the cultural battlefield, and hold the commanding heights in the bureaucracy, otherwise chris steele would have been reprimanded
the one who burned him, almost 20 years ago, Richard Tomlinson, was welcomes back into the fold, after burning 150 of his colleagues,
@Achilles, do you have even the slightest scintilla of proof for your assertions at 11:56?
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?
I think you know the answer to this one. If memory serves me, in a discussion of law school classes, you posted that most of your students sat there quietly. They were afraid if they called bullshit, they would be punished. My son recently graduated from the University of Texas Law School. He called bullshit. The uber-feminist einsatz SJW kommando was not able to exterminate him, but the motherfuckers tried. I have diplomas from the University of Texas in Chemical Engineering and English. I hate the school now.
Hey, I'm so old, I remember protesting and marching for civil rights as a democrat. I look around and see My first amendment gone cause of "science is hard", so trust the experts. And the lockdown protesters called domestic terrorists.
there's also the detail that kislyak was the link man of 30 democratic senators to the iran deal, so he could have easily recorded the call with general Flynn who was against that deal
"San Diego official reveals only six of county's nearly 200 COVID-deaths are 'pure, solely coronavirus' deaths"
Six out of 3.3 million people. Panic and lies are going to destroy us. Those pushing this crap on us did one, or the other, or both, and I can't trust any of you after this. If you also voted for Hillary, thought the charges against Kavanaugh were valid, believe Obamagate is bullshit, but Trump is a Russian asset, or even a few of those things, you are too foolish to be trusted for decision making let alone information. You shouldn't even be allowed to vote due to mental disability.
Freder Frederson said...
"What you had once was one nation, one society, one culture."
When exactly was that? Certainly not before 1865. Certainly not during the wave of mass open immigration from the late 1860's to the 1920's. Certainly not during the period of the Jim Crow South (and the less rigid, but still pervasive segregation in the North). Are you looking at a few halcyon days in the mid-60s?
The point Freder makes here needs to be reinforced.
Ever since he founding of the country the aristocracy has fought to keep their old ways and systems of control. They have been a 5th column for all of history in every society they want to lord over.
Slavery became Jim Crow became Affirmative Action.
Our Public Education system is perfectly socioeconomically segregated and mostly racially segregated and infested with racial bias schemes.
Eugenics became Planned Parenthood.
The media is owned by about 10 people. It is more in line with the Chicoms than with the American people.
We have cities and states that refuse to enforce federal immigration laws meant to protect citizens instead protecting illegal alien criminals.
The COC GOPe/Democrat party fight to maintain open borders so they can import new voters and cheap labor.
The enemies of freedom have raised their heads repeatedly and they will always be around because some people just want to control everyone else.
I think the greatest generation is the last generation that experienced wide spread hard times, lack of employment, most of the boomer generation didn't and neither have the subsequent generations. They don't appreciate how important a strong economy is and so are indifferent to what might result from the continued shutdown and people losing their businesses and having no employment. Plus, they been trained to follow, such as the constant TV messages, we all alone together and we'll get through this and other propaganda.
"If you don't think Kislyak's phone was bugged you are deluding yourself."
Agreed. I think the current puzzle is whether our fearless FBI had Flynn under electronic surveillance separately from the "incidental" capture of the Kislyak call. The question is arising because there is no unmasking of Flynn in the call with Kislyak on the list of unmaskings put out by Grenell. The implication is that the FBI was spying on Flynn directly, separately from anything that needed to be unmasked.
If true, who else were they spying on directly? Many of us are wondering whether Team Obama through the FBI counterintelligence function had a program to spy on its political opposition--Cruz, Jeb!, Rubio, Ryan, etc.
Stasi time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAjWYFBSFNs
"I Wasn't Born To Follow". Easy Rider
Real rebels take on their own generation. Your parents will always love you.
And the baby boomers destroyed the universities.
To the Demcorats/WaPo/NYT Flynn is just collateral damage in their war with Trump. "you can't make an omelet, etc."
I'd like to coin a phrase: "toxic victimhood"
Read this, and you'll get why it's such a thing.
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2020/05/their-happiness-hurt-my-feelings.html
It turns out that just being happy or having symbols of happiness around is a microaggression. From the woke minds of two academics (and why are so many of these nuts women?).
HT: Instapundit
"It turns out that the reckless visibility of a wedding photo may be crushing the self-esteem out of the touchily unwed. You see, the mere sight of a photo of someone’s happy day can “crowd out the experiences of people with minoritized social identities,” albeit in ways never quite explained. Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”
"What you had once was one nation, one society, one culture."
What is was was one set of values, one set of aspirations. Freedom, family, home ownership, tolerance, opportunity, and mostly under the umbrella of Judaeo/Christian ethics.
Why aren't young people speaking out more? Well, maybe its because they get de-platformed and censored. Can't use the wrong words or attack the sacred cows - or you get banned and your employers and School administrators are informed.
And if you do a street demonstration in favor of free speech then antifa will show up and "violence will break out". Aka some left-wing thug will hit you with a bike-lock.
Who was clamping down on the Vietnam protesters on campus? Bill Walton was involved in destroying UCLA property and invading school buildings and didn't even get his wrist slapped. Had a co-worker who bragged about how they "Shut down the freeway" in 1970, he didn't even get arrested.
"If we're so un-great, why are the youngsters following us?"
A bunch of relative "youngsters" have not been following you -- rejecting the pop music of the 1960s, rejecting the drugs of the 1960s, rejecting the rejection of the family of the 1960s, and rejecting the Great Society government expansion of the 1960s. Conservatives, you know. A few even among the commentators here.
The crisis that I think is being ignored is the millions of Herpes Simplex deaths. The vast majority of deaths are people who are positive for Herpes. Something, anything, but something very serious needs to be done. We must flatten the curve. Actually the curve is pretty flat, but the death numbers are astronomical and increasing every year - a thousand times worse than the Corona.
So many people giving Taibbi credit for honesty. Yet he keeps dropping attacks on Trump, Cheney, and others, while discussing the serious matter of a true government conspiracy to spy on an opposition party coming to power and lie to the American people about the motives. And the argument is "we now know", except much of this information was provided by... Trump as it was happening. Except nobody wanted to believe Trump.
We just found out in newly-released testimony by McCabe that the FBI felt as early as the summer of 2016 that the evidence “didn’t particularly indicate” that Papadopoulos was “interacting with the Russians.”
Papadopoulos, Trump, even Rush Limbaugh have been saying this for 3 years. I get it, nobody trusts them, but they trust McCabe. I get the Taibbi is trying to suggest they not trust McCabe. I am even partial to the argument of not trusting anybody in government including Trump and Cheney. Yet Taibbi is mostly appealing to the media to look at this evidence. He may be providing a better argument than Trump's Press Secretary, yet here's my point: Most of the media was in on this!
The media knew who was leaking what to whom going back to Cheney, then Obama, then Yates and McCabe. They were the recipients of the leaks. They "knew", in the same sense that the latest evidence shows conclusively, back when it was happening and they didn't care. And he's not addressing this to millennials. He never does. He's addressing this to the media:
If you’re in the media
Nobody bothered to wonder if they actually had any evidence. [except those on the right, including Trump, asking what it was for years]
Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints Investigative journalism? Sharyl Attkisson has written three books about the media not bothering.
Republicans throughout this time were usually as bad or worse on these issues No evidence provided. Although evidence is available that even Republican members of Congress were hiding the information recently released and are not interested in investigating further.
On the other hand, Taibbi touches on a key point that Trump supporters need to grasp.
I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state.
Until people are back marching in the streets; nothing at all will change. Even when they were, the only change, as being reported by Taibbi, is that things got worse (maybe, Taibbi's hedging on the worse, but I'm not).
Jurinalism 101: 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs'.
-------------
"After more than six months of study and deliberation, the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided it will not revoke the foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times.
In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931. [A complete list of the articles, with dates and headlines, is below.]
"In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short. In that regard, the Board's view is similar to that of The New York Times itself and of some scholars who have examined his 1931 reports. However, the board concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold."
https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty
"And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders."
****************
Lemme fix that for you:
"And yet somehow we coastal would-be elitist Boomers never grew up, so we raised our kids to follow and feel contempt for the infantile values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders."
I and tens of millions of other Americans who came of age in that era sure as shit did NOT later raise our kids to feel contempt for the past. The crushing electoral defeats of McGovern and later Mondale show that a sizable number of adults rejected the leftists clamoring for "power to[our] people!" and the destruction of enduring American values and institutions.
TO THIS DAY we have resisted the progs, which is why why Trump won---despite the Left's sneering about "bitter clingers" and "deplorables". It is WE who have refused to watch the MSM's prissy little elitists sniff into their perfumed hankies as they lecture us about our "hate" and backwardness. Their turd-like ratings are circling the drain precisely because we continue to reject THEIR contempt for American values.
No one has mentioned the rise in urban living since most of us boomers grew up. I am convinced that the larger the system, the larger the body of rules/law that system spawns. More humans crammed into the same space? More rules. I'll bet the size of the average urban high school has gotten much larger- more rules. Life without a bunch rules would be frightful and chaotic to one that has only known a highly regulated life.
I read posts on Seattle subreddits. Posts along the lines of "I saw someone do (X) isn't this against the law?" or "I experienced (X) can I sue?" or "(X) should be illegal". Constant appeals to law or authority for every slight or inconvenience. And let's not forget the "hollaback" thing - in which many feminists advocating punishment for catcalling.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar says there has not been a spike of coronavirus cases in states that have re-opened.
"We are seeing that, in areas that are opening, we're not seeing the spike in cases," Azar explained. "We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed, very localized situations."
Amadeus: "If true, who else were they spying on directly? Many of us are wondering whether Team Obama through the FBI counterintelligence function had a program to spy on its political opposition--Cruz, Jeb!, Rubio, Ryan, etc."
The dems spying on the republicans will be shown to have started in 2015 and encompassed all potential republican contenders, even strong democrat allies like John Kasich and Jeb Bush.
Then, right after Trump nailed down sufficient delegates to win the nomination the number of FISA 702 about queries on Trump and his associates will be shown to have increased manifold and the CIA assets (Halper, Mifsud, etc) will also be shown to have been contacted and activated in late 2015 and early 2016.
Manafort's hiring will be shown to have been an additional hook along with the Carter Page lies leading to the setup of George Papadopolous.
And that will all have been on the CIA/MI6/Italian services side.
Just sit back and watch the confirming documentation emerge.....
I'll bet the size of the average urban high school has gotten much larger- more rules.
Not just urban. There is a tiny town in Illinois that much of my family came from 100 years ago. I used to visit a lot as ancestors are buried there. It had a tiny high school that, amazingly enough, had had three National Merit Scholars in about 20 years. You know what they did ? The state, or may be, the county closed that high school and put all those kids in a giant "Unified High School" about 20 miles away.
I have not heard of any more scholastic triumphs.
The implication is that the FBI was spying on Flynn directly, separately from anything that needed to be unmasked.
I think McCarthy is making the point that it was NOT the FBI, which has some mission on domestic surveillance (with warrants) but the CIA that was spying on him and which, since the Church Committee, has been banned from domestic surveillance.
Freder again:
Anyone who openly displays a firearm at a demonstration, is not "peaceably assembling". They are implicitly threatening those who disagree with them.
Whereas a bike lock or a club is "peaceful assembly" if used by a Berkeley middle school teacher.
because it was a deriguere cause in 2004 even into 2014, as captain America civil war, suggested in the ethos, then the right targets were focused on, taibbi and greenwald were diligently against the antiislamists, against the tea party,
"Anyone who openly displays a firearm at a demonstration, is not "peaceably assembling". They are implicitly threatening those who disagree with them."
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the fact that you are apparently unable to conceive of the possibility that one might possess a firearm as a defensive tool demonstrates that your opinion on the subject is of minimal value to anyone who's willing to think about things deeper than adolescent internet memes.
I don't this fellows politics, but he has been as sharp as any of these others,
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1262051421144432640?s=20
the drone referred in the link, is as dumb as can be ascertained, perhaps singularity dense,
"The turning point for a lot of liberal people I know was Edward Snowden. A lot of liberal people fell in love with Valerie Plame even though she was a CIA agent, but at least she got to pretend she was a victim of the administration because she was a whistleblower."
Well, no. Plame was a victim of the Bush/Cheney Administration because her husband published an op ed that made Cheney angry because it contradicted their claims about Saddam Hussein. For the "sins" of her husband, Plame's CIA career was destroyed. Plame herself was not a whistle-blower and she had not inserted herself into the situation.
Freder Frederson said...
"People in the know and understanding the time lines, and matching them up with govt documents are sure Flynn did not get unmasked, but got caught up in a FBI pen register gathering operation."
Which "people" would that be?
If you don't think Kislyak's phone was bugged you are deluding yourself.
I never said Kislyak's phone was not 'buggged' did I?
But when the time line is matched up with the dates requested to be unmasked, they weren't for the Kislyak call. The time line proves unmasking did not reveal Flynns communication. If not the unmasking?????What?? Flynn was already being spied on. Obama was spying on the Trump transition team. Spying on an American citizen, for political reasons. Ohhh you say but the govt had cause, Flynns contacts and travels were so suspicion, he had to be tracked for national security reasons. Right? Had to be done....Except we know from an FBI document Dated January 4th, 2017 the FBI was stopping the investigation of Flynn because no derogatory information had been unearthed. That document was dated after the decision had been made. In short, there was no predicate, the same as there was never any Russian collusion.
There are thousands of documents that all lay out a time line that cannot be spun
Mike Sylvester is likely being ironic, RE the Logan Act.
The Logan Act is patently unconstitutional and obviously so, even to a layperson.
Nobody has felt threatened for prosecution, because nobody believes it is good law.
Sally Yates knee she was full of Schitt when she mentioned it.
So did everybody else in the room.
And people outside the room several blocks away.
"Given the complete irrationality of many secular state governments, particularly when obvious counter-examples can be pointed to worldwide (Sweden, Georgia, etc)? Particularly when the government is throwing citizens in jail even as it releases career criminals? Trying to say "religion is tyranny" is particularly weak sauce. You'd have to go back to the Black Plague to see Christian governments employ similar restrictions, with much better cause and benevolence."
1. Who is talking about just "Christian governments?" There are other religious states that exist or have existed, and they always tend toward authoritarianism, (see Iran, for instance).
2. There are no Christian governments today, so, of course there are no recent examples of Christian government tyranny.
here's another he's a liberal democrat in the uk
https://twitter.com/CJBdingo25/status/1261801845065953281?s=20
akin to Stephen McIntyre who is anti interventionist iconoclast, who had the best documentation on the Ukraine,
"Cook, fallen or corrupted religion - pharisaic religion - does indeed have that problem. But would you argue that everyone living by Christ’s teachings would make society worse?"
No. I'm not talking about individual religious persons. But it is wrong to believe that personal self-control can only come about through religious belief. It is true,though, when religious dogma is institutionalized into official social or state policy, it leads to authoritarianism and even tyranny.
I'm fine with saying the Boomers were full of themselves and selfish and blind, but why don't the young people call bullshit on the bullshit?
Good question.
Well take one of the bullshits - free sex. You think you are going to get teenagers rioting in the streets for abstinence. Yeah right.
Another one of the bullshits - drugs. You think you are going to get teenagers rioting in the streets to eliminate drugs. Yeah right.
Another one of the bullshits - right or wrong. You think you are going to get teenagers rioting in the streets to demand that their parents discipline them on what is right or wrong. Yeah right.
Another one of the bullshits is there is no God. You think you are going to get teenagers to riot in the streets for God and his teachings. Yeah right.
So it is evident that our culture caters to the young including no draft.there are no major wars.So whats to rebel against. Unless that is not what you meant by the bullshit.
"Cookie is fun to have around. He can find the mist amusing rationales for why every bad thing that happens across the globe for centuries is always due to Americas existence and policies."
A succinct demonstration that you are either intellectually dishonest or intellectually deficient.
Great news on CV-19. USA cases have gone down 13% and deaths down 23% from last week!
how about a swat team, considering his previous record,
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/16/john-brennan-john-durham-unmasking-russia-probe/
Slightly OT: "The implication is that the FBI was spying on Flynn directly, separately from anything that needed to be unmasked."
Not necessarily. Andy McCarthy speculates that the CIA may have been working with a foreign intelligence service to keep tabs on Flynn and obtain the content of the Kislyak call.
conceivable it could have been ghcq or asio, or aisde, the revised intelligence service since 2007, which merged sismi and sisde,
why was a company greenbadger who had been burned by ames as far back as 94, bigfooting over an inr meeting, that was the subject of the memo that powell was carrying that Armitage recited to novak and miller, because the one who convened the meeting, was the deputy official in 1999, when Wilson had been there and met the Iraqi diplomat zahawie,
Cookie: "A succinct demonstration that you are either intellectually dishonest or intellectually deficient."
Precisely the sort of response I would expect from a marxist October Surprise truther.
Good news dems/Lefties/LLR-lefties!
Billy boy Clinton is back on top now that your boy Rapey Biden has murdered #MeToo!
Congrats to all of you.
Really.
Job well done.
iowan2: "But when the time line is matched up with the dates requested to be unmasked, they weren't for the Kislyak call."
Forget it iowan2.
It's Freder-town.
Until people are back marching in the streets; nothing at all will change.
People were marching in the streets. They called themselves the Tea Party. The change was Donald Trump, and the consequent retirement of a whole slew of go-along-get-along RINOs.
More Cook bullshit.
For the "sins" of her husband, Plame's CIA career was destroyed. Plame herself was not a whistle-blower and she had not inserted herself into the situation.
Plame CHOSE her husband, Saudi owned ex-State FSO, to go to Africa to try to dispute the fact that Saddam was seeking yellow cake.
Robert Cook said...
1. Who is talking about just "Christian governments?" There are other religious states that exist or have existed, and they always tend toward authoritarianism, (see Iran, for instance).
2. There are no Christian governments today, so, of course there are no recent examples of Christian government tyranny.
5/17/20, 3:32 PM
Mohammedan governments have always been more total, and more tyrannical, than Christian ones. Certainly compared to their contemporaries. But you can go back as far as you like: I certainly did earlier, to point out that the response of allegedly intolerant and ignorant Christian governments to Yersinia would be far more intelligent and benevolent than secular governments today. At least most people weren't as murderously stupid as Andrew Cuomo's New York.
It's not a religious problem. It's more specific than that, when religion is a problem at all.
ALP said... [hush][hide comment]
I read posts on Seattle subreddits. Posts along the lines of "I saw someone do (X) isn't this against the law?" or "I experienced (X) can I sue?" or "(X) should be illegal". Constant appeals to law or authority for every slight or inconvenience. And let's not forget the "hollaback" thing - in which many feminists advocating punishment for catcalling.
Same on San Francisco, San Jose, Bay Area. Anybody without mask is killing everybody. Children mostly, I suspect.
Steyn ought unfuck himself and say per Buckley April 2020 has been one of the kindest months.
Steyn ought unfuck himself and say per Buckley April 2020 has been one of the kindest months.
Robert Cook said,
"It's no different, and can be worse, in theocracies. Religion, when made integral to or a basis of government's functioning and laws, tends to create highly punitive and restrictive societies, because then it becomes not just man's law, but god's law, against which there can be no rational or persuasive counter argument."
The United States was not a theocracy. It was a nation where for most of its history most people believed in a religion, but they believed in different religions!
That's vastly different from a country where there is a national religion, which has been the story in most countries.
Michael @11:06AM &Wince@11:07AM Speak Heap Big Medicine..
buwaya said, "Nobody in all this believes anything, other than in ones tribal identity."
Really? You think that about yourself, do you? I don't think that about you.
But if you really thought that then you must think many of the people on this page are hypocritical. Now I'm not defending everyone, but other than the fact that we are all fallible and all hypocritical to some extent -- call it the baseline rate -- it seems to me that most people here are striving to be as honest as they know how to be.
Taibbi is aghast at networks hiring unemployed Intell hacks to pontificate on their own felonies.
This is not without precedent. In the ’30’s, NBC Radio hired Al Capone to give thoughtful and probing analysis of Prohibition and IRS issues, Speaking Truth to President Roosevelt.
Seriously, I remember when editors would chew their other left arm off before they would allow FBI or CIA officials in their studios, let alone hire them to alibi their own crimes–-and call it “News”!
Cookie: "For the "sins" of her husband, Plame's CIA career was destroyed. Plame herself was not a whistle-blower and she had not inserted herself into the situation."
LOLOLOL
Complete and utter happy horses***.
Plame is the very person who recommended her husband, who had no business being tasked with that job, be selected.
Cookie: "For the "sins" of her husband, Plame's CIA career was destroyed. Plame herself was not a whistle-blower and she had not inserted herself into the situation."
LOLOLOL
Complete and utter happy horses***.
Plame is the very person who recommended her husband, who had no business being tasked with that job, be selected.
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